Glory Season Read online

  Lysos make it so. Maia tugged an earlobe for luck and resumed hauling her gear down the twisty back stairs of Lamatia’s Summer Crèche, worn smooth by the passage of generations. At each slit window, a chill breeze stroked the newly bare nape of her neck, eliciting a creepy feeling that she was being followed. The duffel was heavy, and Maia nursed a dark suspicion that her sister might have slipped in something extra while her back was turned. If they had kept their braids for another hour, the mothers might have assigned a lugar to carry their effects to the docks. But Leie said it made you soft, counting on lugars, and on that she was probably right. There would be no docile giants to ease their work at sea.

  The Summer Courtyard belied its name, permanently shadowed by the towers where winterlings dwelled behind banks of glass windows with silk curtains. The dim quad was deserted save a single bent figure, pushing a broom under dour, stone effigies of early Lamai clan mothers, all carved with uniform expressions of purse-lipped disdain. Maia paused to watch Coot Bennett sweep autumn demi-leaves, his gray beard waving in quiet tempo. Not legally a man, but a “retiree,” Bennett had been taken in when his sailing guild could no longer care for him—a tradition long abandoned by other matriarchies, but proudly maintained by Lamatia.

  On first taking residence, a touch of fire had remained in Bennett’s eyes, his cracking voice. All physical virility was certifiably gone, but well-remembered, for he used to pinch bottoms now and then, rousing girlish shrieks of delighted outrage, and glaring reproval from the matrons. While formally a tutor for the handful of male children, he became a favorite of all summer kids for his thrilling, embroidered tales of the wild, open sea. That year, Bennett took a special shine to Maia, encouraging her interest in constellations, and the mannish art of navigation.

  Not that they ever actually talked, the way two women might, about life and feelings and matters of substance. Still, Maia fondly recalled a strange friendship that even Leie never understood. Alas, too soon, the fire had left Bennett’s old eyes. He stopped telling coherent stories, lapsing into gloomy silence while whittling ornate flutes he no longer bothered to play.

  The old man stooped over his broom as Maia bent to catch his rheumy eye. Her impression, perhaps freighted with her own imaginings, was of an active void. Of anxious, studied evasion of the world. Did this happen naturally to males no longer able to work ships? Or had the Lamai mothers somehow done it to him, both erasing a nuisance and guaranteeing he really was “retired”? It made her curious about the fabled sanctuaries, which few women entered, where most men finally went to die.

  Two seasons ago, Maia had tried drawing Bennett out of his decline, leading him by hand up narrow spiral steps to the small dome holding the clan’s reflecting telescope. Sight of the gleaming instrument, where months earlier they had spent hours together scanning the heavens, seemed to give the old man pleasure. His gnarled hands caressed its brass flank with sensuous affection.

  That was when she had shown him the Outsider Ship, then so new to the sky of Stratos. Everyone was talking about it, even on the tightly censored tele programs. Surely Bennett must have heard of the messenger, the “peripatetic,” who had come so far across space to end the long separation between Stratos and the Human Phylum?

  Apparently, he hadn’t. Bewildered, Bennett seemed at first to think it one of the winking navigation satellites, which helped captains find their way at sea. Eventually, her explanation sank in—that the sharp glimmer was, in fact, a starship.

  “Jelly can!” he had blurted suddenly. “Bee-can Jelly can!”

  “Beacon? You mean a lighthouse?” She had pointed to the spire marking Port Sanger’s harbor, its torch blazing across the bay. But the old man shook his head, distraught. “Former!… Jelly can former!” More phrases of slurred, nonsensical man-dialect followed. Clearly, something had happened that was yanking mental strings. Strings once linked to fervent thoughts, but long since fallen to loose threads. To Maia’s horror, the coot began striking the side of his head, over and over, tears streaming down his ragged cheeks. “Can’t ’member … Can’t!” He moaned. “Former … gone.… can’t …”

  The fit had continued while, distraught, she maneuvered him downstairs to his little cot and then sat watching him thrash, muttering rhythmically about “guarding” something … and dragons in the sky. At the time, Maia could think of but one “dragon,” a fierce figure carved over the altar in the city temple, which had frightened her when she was little, even though the matrons called it an allegorical beast, representing the mother spirit of the planet.

  Since that episode on the roof, Maia had not tried communicating with Bennett again … and felt ashamed of it. “Is anyone there?” she now asked softly, peering into his haunted eyes. “Anyone at all?”

  Nothing fathomable emerged, so she bent closer to kiss his scratchy cheek, wondering if the confused affection she now felt was as close as she would ever come to a relationship with a man. For most summer women, life-long chastity was but one more emblem of a contest few could win.

  Bennett resumed sweeping. Maia warmed her hands with steamy breath, and turned to go just as a ringing bell cracked the silence. Clamoring children spilled into the courtyard from narrow corridors on all sides. From toddlers to older threes and fours, they all wore bright Lamatia tartans, their hair woven in clan style. Yet, all such bids at tasteful uniformity failed. Unlike normal kids, each summer brat remained a blaring show of individuality, painfully aware of her uniqueness.

  Except the boys, one in four, hurrying like their sisters to class, but with a swagger that said, I know where I’m going. Lamatia’s sons often became officers, even shipmasters.

  And eventually coots, Maia recalled as old Bennett blankly kept sweeping around the ruckus. Women and men had that much in common … everyone grew old. In her wisdom, Lysos had long ago decreed that life’s rhythm must still include an end.

  Running children stopped and goggled at Maia. She stared back, poker-faced. Dressed in leather, with her hair cropped, she must look like one of last night’s revelers, gone astray from the tavern. Slim as she was, perhaps they took her for a man!

  Suddenly several kids laughed out loud. Jemanine and Loiz threw their arms around her. And sweet little Albert, whom she used to tutor till he knew the constellations better than Port Sanger’s twisty lanes. Others clustered, calling her name. Their embraces meant more to Maia than any benediction from the mothers … although next time she met any of them, out in the world, it might be as competitors.

  The clanging resumed. A tall lugar with white fur and a droopy snout lurched into the courtyard waving a brass bell, clearly perturbed by this break in routine. The children ignored the neckless creature, peppering Maia with questions about her braid, her planned voyage, and why she’d chosen to snub the Parting Ceremony. Maia felt a kind of thrill, being what the mothers called a “bad example.”

  Then, into the courtyard flowed a figure smaller but more fearsome than the upset lugar—Savant Mother Claire, carrying a tang prod and glaring fiercely at these worthless var brats who should be at their desks.… The children took heel, with a few of the boldest daring to wave one last farewell to Maia before vanishing. The distressed lugar kept swinging the bell until the wincing matron put a stop to the clangor with a sharply driven elbow.

  Mother Claire turned and gave Maia a calculating regard. Even in old age, she embodied the Lamai type. Furrow-browed and tight-lipped, yet severely beautiful, she had always, as far back as Maia remembered, cast a gaze of withering disdain. But this time, instead of the expected outrage at Maia’s shorn locks, the headmistress’s appraisal ended with an astonishing smile!

  “Good.” Claire nodded. “First chance, you claimed your own heritage. Well done.”

  “I …” Maia shook her head. “… don’t understand.”

  The old contempt was still there—an egalitarian scorn for anything and everybody non-Lamai. “You hot-time brats are a pain,” Claire said. “Sometimes I wish the founders of S
tratos had been more radical, and chosen to do without your kind.”

  Maia gasped. Claire’s remark was almost Perkinite in its heresy. If Maia herself had ever said anything remotely slighting the first mothers, it would have meant a strapping.

  “But Lysos was wise,” the old teacher went on with a sigh. “You summerlings are our wild seeds. Our wind-blown heritage. If you want my blessing take it, var-child. Sink roots somewhere and flower, if you can.”

  Maia felt her nostrils flare. “You kick us out, giving us nothing.…”

  Claire laughed. “We give plenty. A practical education and no illusions that the world owes you favors! Would you prefer we coddled you? Set you up in a go-nowhere job, like some clans do for their vars? Or drilled you for a civil-service test one in a hundred pass? Oh, you’re bright enough to have had a chance, Maia, but then what? Move to Caria City and push papers the rest of your life? Scrimp on salary to buy an apartment and someday start a microclan of one?

  “Pah. You may not be all Lamai, but you’re half! Find and win a real niche for yourself. If it’s a good one, write and tell us what you’ve got. Maybe the clan will buy into the action.”

  Maia found the strength to voice what she had wanted to say for years. “You hypocritical cat—”

  “That’s it!” Mother Claire cut her off, still grinning. “Keep listening to your sister. Leie knows it’s tooth and claw out there. Go on now. Go and fight the world.”

  With that, the infuriating woman simply turned away, leading the placid lugar past the nodding, bleary-eyed old coot, following her charges toward the classroom where sounds of recitation rose to fill the cool, dry air.

  To Maia, the courtyard, so long such a broad part of her world, suddenly felt close, claustrophobic. The statues of old-time Lamais seemed more stony-chill and stark than ever. Thanks, Momma Claire, she thought, pondering those parting words. I’ll do just that.

  And our first rule, if Leie and I ever start our own clan, will be—no statues!

  Maia found Leie munching a stolen apple, leaning against the merchants’ gate, looking beyond the thick walls of Lamatia Hold to where cobblestone streets threaded downhill past the noble clanholds of Port Sanger. In the distance, a cloud of hovering, iridescent zoor-floaters used rising air currents to drift above the harbor masts, on the lookout for scraps from the fishing fleet. The creatures lent rare, festive colors to the morning, like the gaudy kite-balloons children would fly on Mid-Winter’s Day.

  Maia stared at her twin’s ragged haircut and rough attire. “Lysos, I hope I don’t look like that!”

  “Your prayer is answered,” Leie answered with a blithe shrug. “You got no hope of looking this good. Catch.”

  Maia grabbed a second apple out of the air. Of course Leie had swiped two. On matters of health, her sister was devoted to her welfare. Their plan wouldn’t work without two of them.

  “Look.” Leie gestured with her chin toward the slope-sided clanhold chapel, where a group of five-year summer girls had gathered on the portico. Rosin and Kirstin munched sweet cakes nervously, careful not to get crumbs on their borrowed gowns. Their braids were all primly tied with blue ribbons, ready to be clipped in ceremony by the clan archivist. In cynical conjecture, Leie bet that the pragmatic mothers traded all that glossy hair to burrower colonies to use as nest material, in exchange for a few pints of zec-honey.

  Each of those young women bore a family resemblance, having effectively shared the same mother as Maia and Leie. Still, the half sisters had grown up knowing, even better than the twins did, what it meant to be unique.

  They must be even more scared than I am, Maia thought sympathetically.

  Within the dim recesses of the chapel, she made out several senior Lamai and the priestess who had come up from the city temple to officiate. Maia envisioned wax candles being lit, setting aflicker the deep-incised lettering that rimmed the stone sanctum with quotations from the Founders’ Book and, along one entire wall, the enigmatic Riddle of Lysos. Closing her eyes, she could picture every carven meter, feel the rough texture of the pillars, almost smell the incense.

  Maia didn’t regret her choice, following Leie’s example and spurning all the hypocrisy. And yet …

  “Suck-ups,” Leie snapped, dismissing their peers with a disdaining snort. “Want to watch them graduate?”

  After a pause, Maia answered with a headshake. She thought of a stanza by the poet Wayfarer …

  Summer brings the sun,

  to spread across the land.

  But winter abides long,

  for those who understand.

  “No. Let’s just get out of here.”

  Lamai clan mothers had their hands in shipping and high finance, as well as management of the city-state. Of the seventeen major, and ninety minor, matriarchies in Port Sanger, Lamatia was among the most prominent.

  You wouldn’t imagine it, walking the market districts. There were some russet-haired Lamais about, proud and uniformly buxom in their finely woven kilts, striding ahead of hulking lugars in livery, laden with packages. Still, among the bustling stalls and warehouses, members of the patrician caste seemed as scarce as summer folk, or even the occasional man.

  There were plenty of stocky, pale-skinned Ortyns in sight, especially wherever goods were being loaded or unloaded. Identical except in the scars of individual happen-stance, the pug-nosed Ortyns seldom spoke. Among themselves words seemed unnecessary. Few of that clan became savants, to be sure, but their physical strength and skill as teamsters—handling the temperamental sash-horses—made them formidable in their niche. “Why keep and feed lugars,” went a local saying, “when you can hire Ortyns to move it for you.”

  A gang of those stocky clones had Musician’s Way snarled, their dray obstructing traffic as six identical women wrestled with a block and tackle slung from the rafter of an upper-story workshop. Like many buildings in this part of town, this one leaned over the street, each floor jutting a little farther on corbeled supports. In some neighborhoods, edifices met above the narrow road, forming arches that blocked the sky.

  A crowd had gathered, entranced by the creaking load high above—an upright harp-spinet, constructed of fine wood inlay by the Pasarg clan of musical craftswomen for export to one of the faraway cities of the west. Perhaps it would ride the Grim Bird along with Maia and Leie … if the workers got it safely to ground first. A gaggle of the sallow-faced, long-fingered Pasargs had gathered below, trilling nervously whenever the sash-horses stamped, setting the cargo swaying overhead. If it crashed, a season’s profits might be ruined.

  To other onlookers, the tense moment highlighted a drab autumn morning. Hawkers-converged, selling roasted nuts and scent-sticks to the gathering crowd. Slender money rods were swapped in bundles or broken to make change.

  “Winter’s comin’, so get yerself a’ready!” shouted an ovop seller with her basket of bitter contraceptive herbs. “Men are finally coolin’ off, but can you trust yerself with glory frost due?”

  Other tradeswomen carried reed cages containing live birds and Stratoin hiss lizards, some of them trained to warble popular tunes. One young Charnoss clone tried to steer a herd of gangly llamas past the high wheels of the jiggling wagon, and got tangled with a political worker wearing a sandwich board advertising the virtues of a candidate in the upcoming council elections.

  Leie bought a candied tart and joined those gasping and cheering as the delicately carved spinet narrowly escaped clipping a nearby wall. But Maia found it more interesting to watch the Ortyn team on the back of the wagon, working together to free the jammed winch. It was a rare electrical device, operating on battery power. She had never seen Ortyns use one before, and thought it likely they had mishandled it in some way. None of the clans in Port Sanger specialized in the repair of such things, so it came as no surprise when, without a word or any other apparent sign, the Ortyns gave up trying to make it work. One member of the team grabbed the release catch while the others, as in a choreographed dance, turned a
nd raised callused hands to seize the rope. There were no cries or shouts of cadence; each Ortyn seemed to know her sisters’ state of readiness as the latch let go. Muscles bunched across broad backs. Smoothly, the cargo settled downward, kissing the wagon bed with deceptive gentleness. There were cheers and a few disappointed boos as money sticks changed hands, settling wagers. Maia and her twin hoisted their duffels once more, Leie finishing her tart while Maia turned pensive.

  The Ortyns almost read each others’ minds. How are Leie and I supposed to fake something like that?

  When they were younger, she and her sister sometimes used to finish each other’s sentences, or knew when and where the other was in pain. But at best it had been a tentative link, nothing like the bond among clones, whose mothers, aunts, and grandmothers shared both genes and common upbringing, stretching back generations. Moreover, the twins had lately seemed to diverge, rather than coalesce. Of the two, Maia felt her sister had more of the hard practicality needed to succeed in this world.

  “Ortyns an’ Jorusses an’ Kroebers an’ bleedin’ Sloskies …” Leie muttered. “I’m so sick of this rutty place. I’d kiss a dragon on the mouth, not to have to look at the same faces till I julp.”

  Maia, too, felt an urge to move on. Yet, she wondered, how did a stranger get to know who was whom in a foreign town? Here, one learned about each caste almost from birth. Such as the willowy, kink-haired Sheldons, dark-skinned women a full head taller than the blocky Ortyns. Their usual niche was trapping fur-beasts in the tundra marshes, but Sheldons in their mid-thirties often also wore badges of Port Sanger’s corps of Guards, overseeing the city’s defense.

  Long-fingered Poeskies were likewise well-suited to their tasks—deftly harvesting fragile stain glands from cracked stellar snails. They were so good at the dye trade, cadet branches had set up in other towns along the Parthenia Sea, wherever fisherfolk caught the funnel-shaped shells.